Kareen Lacroix at U.S. Naval Recruiting offices in Garden City, New York.

Petty officer 2nd Class Kareen Lacroix likes that she catches people off guard when she tells them about her career in the U.S. Navy.

The Brooklyn native said that, in her civilian life, she dresses “very dolled up.” Her appearance doesn’t let on that she has served her country for 13 years — first as a hull-maintenance technician welding and fixing the plumbing in the gritty bowels of ships, and then as a member of a funeral honors team for veterans who die.

“Some people are totally taken aback when I tell them I am in the military,” said Lacroix, 36, who grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant. “I may not look like what they have in mind for someone who serves in the armed forces.”

Lacroix is now a naval recruiter — and she makes signing up women a priority. In her pitch to prospective enlistees, she tells them there is no difference between men and women who wear a uniform.

“If a woman has an issue with differentiation in pay, they will never have to worry about that in the armed services,” she said. “If they’re the same rank as a male counterpart, they will never have to worry about being paid less.”

Chief Petty Officer Agnieszka Grzelczyk outside Fort Hamilton Army Base in Brooklyn. She currently serves in the Navy.

(New York Daily News)

Lacroix is among a proud tradition of women enlisting in the military for the past 100 years.

In 1917, during World War I, women were officially allowed to join the Naval Reserve Force. They mainly served in clerical positions.

Now there are more than 208,000 active female enlistees and officers currently serving in the Army, Marines, Navy and Air Force. They hold all positions, including combat roles.

Women make up 15% of all armed services, according to retired Navy Capt. Lory Manning, the director of government relations at the Service Women’s Action Network. There are also 2.2 million living female veterans — and that number is on the rise, Manning said.

Four members of the all-women’s Civil Air Patrol who are studying radio to be of greater service to the home forces, in Detroit on June 20, 1942.

(AP)

Manning served for 25 years, from the Vietnam War era to the mid-’90s. She saw firsthand how women’s roles in the Navy have evolved.

When she started, only female nurses could be on naval ships. And when a woman became pregnant, she would have to leave the Navy. All those rules — and more — changed during the course of Manning’s service.

“When I first went into the Navy, women were not allowed to command authority over men,” she said. “I actually became a commander and had that authority over men and women who worked for me.”

Retired Marine Cpl. Colleen McCarthy said each generation of women in the military helped pave the way for the next. “We came a long way since the women of World War II,” said McCarthy, 55, of Throggs Neck, in the Bronx.

In a Thursday May 12, 2016, photo, Elizabeth L. Gardner, a member of the Women's Airfare Service Pilots, sits at the controls of a B-26 Marauder at Harlingen Army Air Field, Texas, between 1943-44.

(AP)

McCarthy, who works in the Bronx district attorney’s office, served from 1981 to 1985 after stopping in a recruiting office while a student at John Jay College. She still remembers the grueling boot camp on Parris Island, S.C.

“That was rough,” McCarthy said. “I’m not going to lie. Being a city girl, I didn’t know what I was getting into.”

McCarthy and several other women veterans recently started a Bronx chapter of the Women Marines Association. The chapter will be named after Cpl. Ramona Valdez, one of the first women Marines killed in Iraq.

“I am proud of my service and I am proud of the fact that I am able to help my fellow veterans today,” McCarthy said.

In an undated photo provided by the U.S. Air Force, Frances Green (from l.), Margaret (Peg) Kirchner, Ann Waldner and Blanche Osborn leave their plane, "Pistol Packin' Mama," at the four-engine school at Lockbourne Army Air Field, Ohio, during WASP ferry training for the B-17 Flying Fortress bomber.

(U.S. Air Force/AP)

Chief Petty Officer Agnieszka Grzelczyk, 36, said she joined the Navy because she wanted to go to college and do something she couldn’t do in her homeland

She and her family emigrated from Poland to the United States in 1999 when she 18. She joined the Navy a year later. At the time, Poland didn’t allow women in its military. “This was an opportunity to do something really different,” she said.

The Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, resident has been deployed to several countries around the globe, including as a translator in Afghanistan with NATO forces. She also worked as a flight attendant on the secretary of the Navy’s plane.

Now she works as a naval recruiter in northern New Jersey.

Lt. Gen Nadja West, the 44th U.S. Army Surgeon General and Commanding General of the U.S. Army Medical Command, waits on the pitcher mound to present the game ball prior to the start of a baseball game between the St. Louis Cardinals and Washington Nationals in May 2016.

(Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)

“We are actually recruiting a lot more ladies to join, especially in the fields that were considered male-oriented, like special warfare and engineering,” she said.

Allison Jaslow, the executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said because the number of women in the military has increased dramatically, the government has a duty to meet their needs when they exit the armed services.

Jaslow, 35, who lives Greenwich Village, was an Army captain who served two combat deployments in Iraq in the 2000s.

Her organization is pushing Congress to pass the Deborah Sampson Act, which is named in honor of a woman who disguised herself as a man to serve in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War.

The act would help women veterans better access health care, including peer-support systems.

Jaslow knew she wanted to join the Army since she went to Fort Myer in Virginia for career day in the eighth grade. “The Army swept me off my feet that day,” she said. “Service is something that still drives me to this day.”